Assessment of Engineering Students’ Leadership Competencies

Abstract

Leadership development has become increasingly important in engineering education as companies look for engineers with leadership, communication, and teamwork skills. To embed these competencies into engineering curricula, a competency-based educational model has been implemented in which 4th-year engineering students led design project teams made up of 1st-year students. The study described in this paper had two aims. The first was to determine which leadership competencies were exhibited by the 4th-year students. The second was to assess their perceived leadership effectiveness. We identified leadership competencies using the behavioral event interview technique and measured leadership effectiveness using a 360-degree assessment. The results demonstrate that the student leaders exhibited the following competencies most frequently: commitment to learning, interpersonal communication, teamwork, and results orientation. The results also indicate that the 1st-year students perceived the student leaders' leadership effectiveness as satisfactory. The educational model described in this paper can easily be implemented in other institutions to encourage and nurture leadership talent in students.L e a d e r s h i p a n d M a n a g e m e n t

Reviewing a decade of research on Engineering Leadership

“…These articles typically recount the required courses in engineering leadership and explore frameworks to incorporate those courses into engineering curricula [28]. Others discuss key leadership qualities for engineers and the nature and make-up of these qualities that helps engineering students develop their leadership skills ( [2] While still others provide instruments to assess, examine, refine and develop curricula, as well as advising materials, methods and predictors of successful leadership in engineering [20]; [21]; [16]; [22]; [22]; [23]. Other papers also attempt to describe the challenges and shortfalls of their own leadership programs [24].…”

Personality and Leadership Qualities among Student Leaders

“…The importance of students leadership has been explored among nursing students [6 -8], engineering students [9], students involved in youth ministry [10], and business administration department students [11]. Most of these researches explored the effectiveness of leadership and leadership behaviors among students in general.…”

Developing Leadership through an Immersive Service-Oriented International Internship

“…The questions for this study were based on previous studies of service-oriented project-based learning programs at Universities in addition to student leadership competencies in engineering (Huff, 2015). These questions are heavily related to the competencies that have been shown to demonstrate leadership quality including commitment to learning, drive for excellence, integrity, communication, responsiveness to change, results orientation, and teamwork (Ozgen, 2013). The survey was anonymous and queried the students as to what extent their CEDC experience contributed to a variety of leadership-related traits related to the competencies above.…”

“…For the purpose of this paper, the term leadership will be used to represent a variety of competencies that have been shown to demonstrate effective leadership skills in students (Ozgen, 2013). These competencies include client orientation, commitment to learning, drive for excellence, integrity, interpersonal communication, responsiveness to change, results orientation, and teamwork (Ozgen, 2013).…”